Thirty years ago, the migrant justice movement lost an unlikely leader. Father Luis Olivares was a Catholic priest and California activist whose untimely death cut short an unusual career that was transformed by the popular movements of his day.

Subtitle notwithstanding, Mario T. García’s biography of Olivares is much more an account of the priest as seen by his peers than the story of the sanctuary movement that made him a national figure. It’s a personal, not a political history, and the priest’s radicalism sometimes appears to outflank his biographer’s progressive liberalism.

Nevertheless, a remarkable story emerges from García’s book: that of an ambitious and conservative Church bureaucrat, whose radicalization under the influence of social movements placed his parish at the heart of one of the biggest political battles of the 1980s United States.